Track Query Tuning Progress and History in Plan Explorer
Category:
query-performance
As you tweak and test queries, it’s awfully useful to see how the performance has changed.
Setting up Free Blocking Alerts and Deadlock Monitoring (Dear SQL DBA Episode 17)
Category:
query-performance
, sql-server
What tools in SQL Server will notify you about blocking and help track the queries behind your toughest blocking and deadlocking problems?
Measuring Query Duration: SSMS vs SQL Sentry Plan Explorer
Category:
query-performance
Every query tuner wants to explain exactly how much faster we made a query.
But sometimes SQL Server Management Studio adds noticeable overhead to the query duration. For relatively fast queries that return more than a few rows, just the overhead of displaying the results can skew your duration metric.
Which is Worse: an Unused Index, or an Un-Indexed Foreign Key? (Dear SQL DBA Episode 16)
Category:
query-performance
Should you always index your foreign keys? What if you index them, and then the index never gets used?
Index Tuning Decision Tree for SQL Server
Category:
query-performance
I recently mapped out my thought process for how I approach a new instance of SQL Server when it comes to index tuning.
Deadlock Code for the WideWorldImporters Sample Database
Category:
monitoring-troubleshooting
, sql-server
If you haven’t checked out Microsoft’s new WideWorldImporters sample database for 2016, it’s a pretty cool new little database. The database makes it easy to play around with new 2016 features, and it even ships with some cool little executables to run inserts in the “workload-drivers” folder.
Unique Constraints vs Unique Indexes
Category:
query-performance
, sql-server
Unique constraints and unique nonclustered indexes have a lot in common: unique constraints are implemented with a unique index behind the scenes.
While unique nonclustered indexes have a couple of additional features, I can still think of a scenario where it might be best to use unique constraints.